Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Yeah, harping. It looks like this is going to be the administration's mantra; it wasn't us, it was the media intelligence community. When I go to the money machine at night, I'm not looking over my shoulder for the media - I'm looking for the intelligence community!

Yeah, I wouldn't doubt that we had bad intelligence. But I'm not buying that there was no pressure from above to come up with something. I'm real sure the administration, who had an agenda to remove Saddam from before they came to power, was just willing to let the intelligence community to do their thing and then see what happens. They strike me as "maybe we'll get lucky" kind of guys. Unless if they just knew the intelligence community would fuck it up, in which case that was a pretty shrewd maneuver.

"Limited data"? What the shit is up with that? We had our foot in Saddam's ass for years. I understand that intelligence gathering is difficult and takes time, but c'mon. Iraq still had to be one of the most heavily watched countries on the fucking planet. Even still, if all we had is limited information, what the fuck are we doing going to war based on it? Doesn't someone at the top check fucking references? Don't we have defense secretaries and national security advisors with underlings who can look into the shit they're handed? Obviously they can't doublecheck everything, since they're relying on the intelligence community to do that for them, but couldn't someone somewhere at sometime have had a conversation like this:

"Are you sure about this?"
"Well, we have limited data."
"Then maybe we shouldn't be starting a war over it."

Of course, there's no point in checking things if you're already hearing the answers you want to hear.

Let me do something I never do here at Fe and give the administration the benefit of the doubt. Check this out, though. Even if the administration put no pressure on anyone, and furthermore they didn't lie but were just acting on bad intel, this is STILL on the administration. Remember how September 11th was the intelligence community's fault, and we've been doing all this shit for over two years to address those issues? Clearly we haven't taken enough measures, and by measures I mean effective measures, to begin solving these problems. TB: GET ON IT.